In the final part of our interview with DC Universe Online’s Game Director Chris Cao, we ask him about SOE's plans for the game's endgame. You can read the earlier parts of the interview, where Chris talks with us about the UI and modding, animation glitching and developer priorities, the planned monthly content updates, and Power Sets we can expect to see in the future.


PCG: So let's clear up some facts before we get into anything else. There doesn’t seem to be a reward for completing the starred options in group-finder queue.

Chris Cao: That was a total bug. We just put in the fix with the Feb update, but you getting a tier 2 badge if you are doing the Alerts or Duo dailies--you’re actually getting the highest armor badge. If you do a Duo daily, you get 1 tier 2 badge and if you do the alert you get 2 tier 2 badges.

PCG: And that's a one-time-per-day reward?

CC: A one-time daily reward. It lets you slow boat your raid armor. Some of our guys playing here don’t have as much time as others running around in tier 2 batsuits but we are getting up there to start buying our pieces. Even if you can only play with one other person it gives you a route to get that end game armor



PCG: How do raid lock outs work? When do they reset? Are you locked to a single instance?

CC: This is actually something we're adding in the near future: an in-game help resource which will be explaining a lot of things including these things because there are a lot of subtleties that are unique to our game. Actually what's interesting is some of the players don’t understand roles fundamentally because they haven’t played MMOs before. While we do list them and show them the abilities, we need a clear place that goes "OK, here is how this works".

So in the case of the lock out timers (which are actually victory flags), when you look at your UI you'll see that red flag which means you’ve actually taken loot off a boss. Coming up in this update or the next we are going to tell you per instance when you queue for an instance if you have victory flags for bosses in there. Our loot system doesn’t actually lock you out of the instance, it just keeps you from getting loot off a boss. The reason we did that is because we wanted people to group with their friends so you can raid as much as you want per week but you can only get loot off a boss once within a given a week and then it resets. The dailies and the weekly victory flags reset on the cycles so you can do that stuff but you can’t get loot off that given boss.

PC Gamer: I often see readers comparing the amount of content or polish in DCUO to MMOs that have been out for 5+ years already. It's gotta be tempting to go for that quantity approach just so you can say, "Look we have as much content as these other games", right?

Chris Cao: Exactly. I think those games had more . If you're taking about City of Heroes or Champions, its interesting because if you compare it to WoW (which only had 9 classes at the beginning, total)--I don’t often compare game to game but the reason I’m doing it is because they controlled the number of interactions. That’s what made their game fun in the endgame. They presented diverse classes that had different combos, that players could play test and have fun at endgame with. It's never been tempting to me .



Some people may go for the popular side of that choice, but we know that in order to create an endgame that will have robust raiding and awesome pvp, Mark, our lead combat designer, I and a few other people are going to have to play every combination. And so we already have 300 something combinations in-game. If you take our movement types, our weapons types, our power set--that's already a ton, not even counting roles. We did a good job, but we found a few things that didn’t work out. Super strength can do a ton of damage and if you're Bane in the legends system it creates this awesome, kill-the-other guy scenario. Which is another layer upon top of it, but to answer your question, I’m always wanting to go with a quality experience over a quantity experience, because it goes with the content we built in the game.

Ultimately it has to get to an endgame and the games the don’t really have an end-game. We built a game that would be fun to play with your friends for months. There is gear at the end, PvP, the Legends stuff, Collections. There's a bunch of stuff that's fun. But why make the process take longer to have your fun? Yeah, it's , but what's funny is that it's still longer than most action games you play. I think, honestly its funny our reviews are polarized: some are really good, some are really bad. And I think its because people go "OK, I’m going to compare this to the other thing that’s like it". Which is completely natural. But when you do so, you don't just play it and see if you have fun with it. We decided to make MMOs more fun to play moment-to-moment and those are the guns we are going to stick to.



PCG: Another major element of endgame is collecting. But collections haven’t really come into their own yet, because of the lack of auction houses. You've said before that crafting professions don’t make a lot of sense in a superhero world, but do you ever foresee crafting professions being added to the game?

CC: First off, the Broker is going out in the February update so that will help in the collection side--a lot--because people haven’t discovered what cool things there are from collections yet. Collections give you things like temporary pets, unique abilities, superpowers and clickable things that you can get. There's a lot of stuff there and there isn’t a great way to trade them, so its hard to complete those collections.

At the end of the day, MMO guys get into the checklist side of things: I’m an MMO gamer and I see this new game and I go, "OK does this new game have this checklist?" and then I play it and then I complain that its exactly like everything else I play. At the end of the day we changed combat, we changed movement and we changed it to some degree that we still have very classic endgame very classic PvP matches. We have badge hunts and the rest of it. But it’s the interesting that are specific to DCUO.

First, in DC you move quickly, which is the reason collections are so big. If you notice when you stand to them, they are half the height of a character because its hard to see things at the speed that a superhero is moving at. I bring this up, because what I like out of most trade skill systems is the harvesting side of it, not the combining side of it. That hunt and peck for something you do in the universe, we’ve got that. Its not just, hey go out and go pick the same thing to make the same thing. That’s the part we don’t have.

We want you to go look for the stuff, trade with your friends and get cool rewards on the other side by collecting it. I can see putting in there. But there's fundamentally two types of games: Games that have cool harvesting and that’s part of the regular gameplay, and games that have trade skills where they dedicate time to the actual crafting of items--I don’t think that’s ever in DCs future. That isn’t the superhero style.

That doesn’t mean the harvesting side won’t be there or we might not continue to build on our collections. But I think its still gonna be something you can do at your superhero speed in those cases that ultimately get you those rewards. I’d like to see how collections pan out for people. I think ultimately, because they are not making armor repeatedly or making a hat, the hardcore people will go, "This isn’t trade skills!" But at the end of the day what you really want is something else to do besides fighting.

That’s what you're looking for: rather than "trade skills," you're thinking, "Hey what is something else I can do?" Like I said ,downtime is a different kind of fun. Not an end of the fun. It's gotta be something else you can do that's fun that you can do while you're waiting for a queue or your friends. There needs to be something more that you're doing that isn’t necessarily beating on a guy.

We have races and we have this collections and investigations, and we are going to continue to fatten out that side of things as well as add more dudes for you to punch in the head. That's our tactic. I’m not going to say "never," but I think when you go with the MMO checklist, you get locked into the MMO checklist and you don’t look at what it's going to make a great experience based on the game you’ve made.

And the flip side of that it works as the same thing, we are just at the beginning of this game. This game is evolving and what we are talking about at launch is just the tip of the iceberg of what players are going to experience.

Today, we talk with DC Universe Online's Game Director Chris Cao about player's issues with the UI and future plans to add mod support, which would let the community solve the problem. You can read the earlier parts of the interview, where Chris talks with us about animation glitching and developer priorities, the planned monthly content updates, and Power Sets we can expect to see in the future.

PCG: Mod support is a great way to let the players' create their own workarounds for UI issues. Are there any plans to add mod support in the future?

Chris Cao: Possibly. We made a decision to not have a modifiable UI because the development side. We already cleaning up some issues with the UI, but the updating the UI on the PS3 is the unfriendliest thing that there can be. So we've had to be really careful with it. What we thought we would do is, "First off, let's launch the game and figure out what works well, then options we have to work with it."

I think that’s a good reason why we split the two platforms. Not the UI specifically, but because sometimes there are things that need to go to one audience that doesn’t need to go to another. That said, there are things we could do that are much more PC-sensible, without necessarily trying to create a disparity between the products. , we want to make sure, that that we're allowing it because we really value it, not just "Hey, the PC guys want to be able to mod their UI," but more, "As a product, how are we going to make DCUO for both audiences? And what can we do to customize it to each one?"



We had discussions internally about allowing modding, but haven’t come to any decision yet. It’s the obvious that a lot of other games allow modding, but they don’t have the same constraints that we do: we have to keep making stuff for both audiences. I don't have a final word on it, but we're watching and seeing what's going to be the most important thing.

I think i some cases even the little things like, we’ve now added support to make it easier to use a keyboard if you have a Bluetooth keyboard for PS3. Quite a few people are using it for text chat, so we’ve said, "OK, for that audience we need to do PS3-specific things to make it easier to communicate there." On the the PC, we’ve done some of the same things to help people have better access to slash commands. Overall, for the customization, we’re going to start off with careful steps to improve the UI, and then look at the other things. I don’t want to say there won't be mods, because these games live for years and obviously more stuff is gonna be added, but we have to be careful that it doesn’t create such a disparity between the services that suddenly the game gets different at a root level.



PCG: Do you think it's possible to keep the two platform versions similar in the long run, with only small deviations along the way?

CC: I think the big deal is that there will be camera and control and UI changes that will be at the forefront of everything as we find what works better . Moving social elements to the Quick Menu is a good example: having a few extra steps of delay whenever you wanted to look at your PDA was clunky. So we moved it to the Quick Menu, because the Quick Menu has become a great place for us to put the things we do repeatedly.

Those types of changes are easier to make because what it comes down to is: if we do anything that starts to affect gameplay balance in PvP or PvE, we have to start balancing the game in two different ways, and that starts to create two different experiences. As soon as I start to imbalance the experience on the PC vs the PS3, one is easier than the other. I think a good example of this is our races. Some people find races easier on the PC than the PS3. We didn’t intend for that to happen, but because of the nature of the race , having a mouse point where you want to go directly is easier, with some movement modes, than controlling the camera independent of movement with a stick .



In those cases that actually diverge, and we have a case where in some ways its easier on the PC than the PS3, we aren’t gonna try to forcefully lock-step them. We're going to take that in stride and do what we can, but we want to be careful of those because we don’t want it to be so radically different that when you're talking to your friend about playing DCUO and he looks at you funny because on the PS3 it was completely different. We still want it to be one universe conceptually, because then its easier to tell the story and keep things going.

Today, we talk with DC Universe Online's Game Director Chris Cao about character creation, future Power Sets being added to the game and how the development team had to choose between quality and quantity in development. If you're playing DCUO as much as we are, be sure to read the earlier parts of the interview, where Chris talks with us about animation glitching and developer priorities and the planned monthly content updates (hint: Penguin's coming!), and tune in each day this week for more insight into our current favorite MMO.

PCG: A few of my comic book-savvy friends are upset that they can't perfectly recreate a character like Superman or Flash because the game's six power sets don't really match those characters. Do see that as a problem that needs to be addressed or is it just a side effect of turning a comic book universe into a fun MMO?

Chris Cao: I know there are a lot of people who want to make a specific character, maybe you have a character concept in your head. There are other comic hero MMOs that create power sets that have no powers because it lets people do certain things. We are looking at it, but what it comes down to is that there are two types of people playing DCUO: those who want to create a specific character concept and that’s more important than the game play or cosmetic variety, and those who want rocking gameplay and abilities that tie together. That's the spectrum: I don’t think players are one way or the other, you're somewhere between that.

For us, the developers, we're staying towards the gameplay more than anything, because adding a new Power type is the biggest change we can make in the game. A new power type affects literally everything we do. So our options are either give you a Power set that really isn’t very different because that's the only safe way to add to it (giving you something that you already have and put different effects on it). Those character concept guys : they're like, "I don’t care if it's different, at least cosmetically, I can get more into my character."



The other alternative (on the gameplay-leaning side) is to say, "Hey, if we're going to add more powers (and we will), let's do it as totally different powers that feel different and provide different gameplay choices." I think our weapons show how different we try to make things. Two-handed feels very different than Bow or Dual-wield and the rest. We're trying to strike that balance , and I think we're always leaning on the gameplay side of those options. I'm not trying to stretch the answer out, but it's really about different people playing the game and a lot of different points of expectation that they're going to have. And we are always going to err on the side of things that makes the gameplay rock and gives it tactical combos and tactical multiplayer choices, rather than just trying to satisfy a player's specific type of hero/villain concept.

One particular case is the Superman and Wonder Woman thing: they have power with no powers. We have their powers in the system, its just people want it called something else. We have Brawling in the game, and if you want to punch guys and smack things around, take the Brawling power set and Super Strength skill and you're doing the Superman thing. Yes, you may have to pick Ice as a Power set, because we made a balanced system where everyone has a weapon, power, and movement mode. But if you want to get into that debate: we do have flexibility in our system. You can role play Superman no problem. You don’t have to use the Ice powers that are offered to you for tanking and those sort of things. You can mix your Power and Skill points, but its fundamentally a MMO, and that means it needs to play well as a multiplayer game with roles and abilities. That’s always going to be our first foot forward. On the cosmetic side, we'll always try to put stuff in for it, but its gotta work as a game first.



PCG: The iconic powers that everyone can access seems to be a good container for things like Superman's laser eyes and Wonder Woman's lasso.

CC: If you made a system that was perfect on the customization side, it would fall onto the gameplay side because they are at odds. You can choose one or the other. Really, DCUO's the kind of game you want to play and we want to make it fun to play with your friends as well as give you the cosmetic side of it, but that's secondary.

PCG: As far as adding new powers in the future, the most obvious one currently missing is the Green Lantern's light powers. You could also do Cyborg's techno-augmentation. Are there any power sets that aren't implemented yet, that you peronsally want to see added sometime in the future?

CC: Designing power types based on one specific hero or villain is the main paradox in making a superhero MMO--if you’re making a game that only has one main hero: like a Superman game or Batman game, its probably less of a problem, because the abilities are customized to that character. But anytime you create something that's more broad (like a power set in DCUO): your inspiration is specific, but your results have to be general.

Superman is a great example: he breaks all the rules. He's super strong and super smart (he's actually an incredible scientist). His story is full of alien technology, heat vision, cold breath, all of the sonic clap abilities, the pounding and ripping, and everything else that goes on. He's a very specific case that people identify with and if you're making  a game about Superman, you can replicate those abilities one for one. If you're making a system of abilities you have to generalize and ask yourself, "OK, what bucket does this ability fall into?" Like th Ice power set in our game: ice is actually two sets of powers (all of the power sets are broken up into two main buckets of abilities). And even though they're different from each other, they are not radically different, so we put them in the same bucket so, anybody who has elemental-like powers will be using, at the start, either Ice or Fire.



PCG: Did any power sets get cut during development?

We tested Earth internally, but we couldn’t make it different from those two just yet, and we didn’t want to put some kind of brown ice out there, so we put it on hold. It wasn't cut, but personally I would love to add Light. We're actually talking right now adding Light. It has a fiction and a lore--especially with the movies upcoming, there's a lot of support--and when we do it, we want to make sure it's cool and not just, "We colored some other abilities or we changed the particle effects."

I think this is pretty key to our game and what's interesting about it: there are other MMOs, superhero or not, where fidelity is traded for variety directly. You get something that’s lower fidelity because you get more of it. It goes back to your earlier question: Do you want fidelity or variety? Obviously everyone wants both. I think a lot of times, MMOs pretend to promise both. In an action game, means something completely different fidelity-wise, and when in an MMO, players and go, "Oh, well ,that fidelity isn’t there because they had to make so much of it." Whatever we put in DCUO, we're going to put it in carefully and we're gonna make sure it has its own value. Whether it's another power tech or weapon--whatever we add, you can be sure that it will make a totally different experience. We figured as long as you like the existing game, we can build more over time. But we’ll only get that once chance to make a good first impression, and if two of our powers are too alike, you're going to think that we cheaped out.



PCG: Do you think there's room for more weapon types to be added as well?

CC: Totally. We had 15 or so weapons that we played around with in development and we boiled it down to 9. In some cases, we did stuff creatively--like we had this Wand weapon type that's a little bit like a Harry Potter superhero. And while it was cool and there are characters in the DC universe that used wands, we just couldn’t come up with enough badass combos. At a certain point, the guy with the wand is bicycle kicking and back flipping. It just didn’t work. So the quality-over-quantity thing came into play and we said "OK, lets boil down".

Another example is we had Single Pistol in for a while, instead of Dual Pistols because there are a lot of DC characters that use just a single pistol. Again, we looked at it and ask ourselves, "Whats cooler? OK, dual pistols it is." And how different are single pistols going to be from dual? We thought our time was better spent making a Two-Handed weapon type or making a Hand Blaster that will really be radically different , rahter than making a Single Pistol.

A good example is Martial Arts vs Brawling. They're different, but both are hand-to-hand. So really, we wanted to be different. We wanted you to be cool because, there's a lot of weapons and powers that we give you, in addition, there's a lot of cool stuff in movement types. Like the Flash is a great example. A lot of the Flash's abilities come from Super Speed, not a power type. If you try to re-make Flash in DCUO, you’re gonna be bigger and better in a lot of cases, because you are gong to have more options.

Last week, I had the opportunity to interview DC Universe Online’s Game Director Chris Cao. We talked about everything from what bugs the dev team is focusing on fixing first, March’s big update, future power and weapon sets being added to the game and if they’re planning to add mod support for the PC version. We’ll be releasing a new portion of the interview every day this week up through Friday! Today, we talk with Chris about today's big February update, how often players can expect updates in the future, and what will be in March's big update. Read part 1 of the interview (Squashing Bugs) here.



PCG: The original plan was to release major content updated every month. But you've said more recently that the quality of the updates is more important then releasing them exactly every four weeks. Do you have an idea of what the absolute longest time you’d be willing to wait between updates, and what's a realistic expectation for fans to have?

CC: It’s a tricky question because people are wondering, "Am I going to get something every month?" The general answer is, "Yes, we are going to try to get it to you every month." But because we have internal processes we need to go through as well--especially because being on the PS3 inherently means there's more than if you were just a PC game. Typically on a PC game, you can just build your own thing and put it out there, and no one else checks on you. But with the PS3, that's obviously not the case and we have a higher standard to hold to.

So really, what we're trying to do is: it takes X long to build an update; let's get ahead of ourselves. As we are now, we’re building stuff for April and May potentially right now. Again, based on where stuff is going to fit , we try to package it up and go, "OK, where does this fit best?", but sometimes we cut stuff. There was actually stuff that was suppose to go in the February update that when I looked at it, I said that hasn’t cooked long enough, or in one case, it just didn’t end up being fun, so we cut it.

The reason I’m trying to expose our internal process to the player base is because it's not as simple as saying, "Hey, here are these things that we’re gonna plan and they're all going to end up being fun and cool." At the end of the day, we play what we've built and go "Wow, that wasn’t or was cool." And sometimes we go, "That’s good enough--we could have made it 10x better with 10x the time, but we aren’t going to invest that." And other times, we go, "Wow, we're lucky that worked out."

What we're tying to do is roughly every month. The main reason for "roughly" is that it can't be "X day of every month", because different months have different number of weeks, so it starts to get off cadence. But basically, you are paying us a subscription fee each month and we want to make sure to give you value each month, and give you fixes in every update and add more and more stuff to the game. I don’t want to set players expectation that, "Yes its this," and then they're disappointed because we didn’t meet the date, but met the content. Judge us based on what we add, and not when we add it--and we will add it as fast as we can at a regular pace.



PCG: Are these content updates going to be targeted to end-game or low-level content? The February update seems to have a bit of both.

CC: For the first one, we knew that we had to give everybody a little something because we'd still have people hitting max level. Right now we don’t have exact percentages, because we are still running to the end of the month. But more and more people are hitting end game than there were in beta, obviously because they're invested in their characters and are going along with it. There are still a large amount of people who are still leveling up. As funny as it is, you have the sort of MMO guys who are like, "I’ll eat the whole game in one day," but then you have the other guys, like the PS3 players saying, "Cool, I come back a couple times a week, and there's still more for me do to!"

So with that breath of an audience, that’s why we have everything in this first update, from the holiday events (whatever level you are you can get in) to the level 30 stuff. If we're going to add new stories, we want to have it be available to the most people. So while we are still looking at a few things we'll add in the leveling game to broaden it out, we want to make sure to add the new stuff at the end. That's where we have the raid and the duo and we've actually added even more than that to the endgame .

A good example by comparison is in the March update. We are looking at our metrics and see that most people are Duo'ing or are about to dou--we really see where the audience is and where the bubble is. Since we're growing and people are still coming in, there are a lot of people who are still leveling, but they want to see what happens to them in February . And so that’s why we made it as broad as we did.

PCG: Thats got to be tough, at this point to not even be sure what you are going to be doing in March. That’s gotta be crazy.

CC: Actually we're building March right now, so while we haven’t released the details on it yet we're watching the metrics , so we can build the stuff into the game that's popular--whether that's what you do by yourself or friend or a couple of friends or a lot of friends. So we have these sort of LEGO building blocks of content than we can go, "OK, lets add one of these here or there." We're obviously going to add more Batcave , because even in beta, people played the Batcave.

We have to finish that series of Raids, but we're building other stuff all the time: Alerts or Duo modes or whatever. And that way, at any time, we can go, "Well, which ones do we want to fit together to make March, based on the audience?" Some of the updates we're building are dedicated to the focus character , while others are meant to add to what we already have. So for example, we had to pull Bane into the February update because we saw that people were liking Duos, but we didn’t have a Duo lined up for February at the time. We were working on making Bane into a Duo alreayd anyways, but we didn’t know when we were gonna use him. So we pulled him into February, so people would have stuff to do with one other person. It’s a flexible strategy, because we have to react to what the players want. And if we don't react to what players want, then we're going to be off in left field and everyone's goings to wonder why we're building more X when they want Y.



PCG: You've mentioned that the February update will add multiplayer races. Is that going to be like Mario kart, where we're cruising around shooting people? Or how is that going to work?

CC: What's funny is that we have multiplayer races in the game right now, but I don’t think most people realize what they are, because we put them in a starting stage . There's these races that turn you into great apes in the city that actually are multiplayer races. So if you got together with your friends, you guys would all get shape changed into one of the evolved or devolved (how ever you want to look at it) apes that you can race as.

In the February update, what we’ve actually done is taken it a step further. In the Valentine's Day event, there's another one of those multiplayer races, but it has "good" and "bad" hearts along the way. The good heart will give you speed boosts and the bad hearts will drop you out of the race. So think of it as our way of moving towards the Mario kart side of racing. You’ll still have to get together with your friends to do it, because its in a shared zone. Ultimately what we'll do, if player think they're fun enough, is take them to private zones and let people queue for them. It's basically: superhero movement is so fun that races are a natural downtime activity for it.

PCG: Is the amount of content in the Catwoman update, not including the holiday part, going to be fairly standard for what players can expect to see on a monthly basis?

CC: It varies. The last time I played it, took 35–45 minutes to complete. It’s a tricky instance, because it has 5 boss fights in it. Its not hard, but each boss does have different elements to fighting them. There's some shared world part, but what we found was working well for us, is the instances give us higher fidelity content. There isn’t a lot of ways to have players be in a shared world with someone who's as exclusive or elusive as Catwoman. She's very much a one-on-one type of character. A lot of the stories that circle around her are robberies and what you're doing with her. So we chose more of an instanced approach.

In the future we might choose to do more of the shared world content and less of the instance-based character stuff. Really what we're doing is telling a story with individual characters. Our efforts are always going towards what's going to play best for this character, and of course for Catwoman, that's going into a place she's robbing to beat up on the guys and finally face against her.



PCG: One character that really stood out to me as I was playing, that didn’t think got his due was the Penguin. He got one tiny cut scene saying, "I’ll be here in the future!" What are some of the DC characters that you are personally looking forward to seeing how they pan out in DCUO?

CC: I can say this with Penguin: I understand where you're coming from, because we treated him doubly unfairly because his restaurant got bottled up by Braniac! You can actually stand there and look at his poor house inside. But I can tell you, coming soon in the near to immediate future, Penguin's coming in.

We have a lot of those characters--even Catwoman is funny, because you fight alongside her as a villain, and you see her a few places, but you don’t get to see her back story. So we definitely are punching her side of it up and we're really looking for the highest profile characters that maybe didn’t get as much treatment as they would. Ambush Bug got way more mileage then he ever had , but that’s because he's a cool character that fits in the gameplay we added him into. And we are just going to keep pulling that up.

For me personally: The Rogues. A lot of cool stuff happens with The Rogues. We have them in a boss fight in Stryker's Prison, but I think there's more we can do with those characters and the Flash stories in general. We have a couple of Flash story arcs in there, but Flash is obviously a high-profile guy. Of course the Justice League stuff: we put two of those episodes in there, but we actually have reserved some JL stuff, because we want to keep it for awhile and make sure we do it right. We're working with DC to figure out how to get that in. Some stuff, we built before launch but didn’t ship with it, because we looked at it and said, "Is there a better way to fit it in the game?"

And other than that, we're going to be playing up a lot of those characters that we've introduced but not a lot of people really know. The big 6 everyone knows. They are classics and we used them well in the stories, but I think people like the Flash--maybe not Gorilla Grodd because marketing would kill me if I put more monkeys in the game--but I think that that tier of character is there . They're not "secondary", because they have their own book series--it's just that they haven’t been in the forefront of the public because they haven’t been as big in movies or anything else.

In our review of DCUO, we noted that while the game has a solid foundation for a robust endgame, SOE would need to follow through on their promise of monthly content updates in order to really thrive. Good news! Less than three weeks after launch, full details about the game's first major content update (available later this month, a bit later than we'd hoped) are out--and it looks to have a little something for everybody--from furries to Mayan god-worshippers to star-crossed lovers to fans of cyclopean baddies.

The official announcement from SOE will be coming out this Friday, but Creative Director Chris Cao already let loose most of the info yesterday in an interview with Massively.

Valentine-specific content will only be available during the month of February, but everything else on this list is here to stay! To help you sort through all of the content being added (and to help you bitch and moan on the forums about why "carebears are totally lame and don't deserve gear" or why "gankers have no soul and SOE should nuke them all from orbit"), we've sorted the different updates into categories for who they're meant to please. Find yourself below and see what's coming your way!



The Raid Leader: "Gotta get that new belt for +2 Might"

Batcave's Back: The hardest raid in the game right now is the Batcave (filled with robots after Braniac took it over, despite the Dark Knight's resistance). Hardcore raiders are still trying to clear the existing content, and SOE is already tossing open the doors to another wing of the Batcave, with harder bosses and sweeter loot. Only the most dedicated raiders will want to take a crack at the sentient computer Brother Eye and his army of OMAC cyborgs right when it's released.
Suit upgrades: Those looking for premium gear will find it here--provided they're capable of downing a multitude of androids and reprogrammed tech, like the Batcave's own riot control mech.


 
The Pacifist: "Can't heroes and villains just get along?"

Win their hearts: For Valentine's day, players can morph into an oh-so-cute cherub form, take to the skies and aim their adorable little bow and arrow at the heartstrings of Metropolis' ordinary citizens. As you collect more hearts (the holiday's currency), you'll contribute to your faction's control over the fountain of love--what that is or why you want it has yet to be revealed, however.
Spread the love: As a cherub, free spirits can do their best impression of Aladdin's magic carpet ride by racing through the clouds as a part of a multiplayer race, flying through hearts for speedboosts and avoiding traps. Or just relive your 6th birthday by collecting hearts in a bouncy castle. Wheee!


 


The Casual: "I'm almost level 20!"

Levels don't matter, baby: Love is free, so your level doesn't matter. You'll be able to participate in all of the cherub events--like races, heart-collecting, and bouncy castles--whether you've reached the level cap or not.
Seasonal items: A lot of slower levelers are moving at the pace they are because they're stopping to smell (and collect) the roses along the way. And holidays add a bunch of new things to collect and explore on the side! Earning enough hearts can net you a his-or-hers Valentine's Day get-up guaranteed to turn heads in Gotham and Metropolis. (We're really hoping it's not a creepy baby cherub outfit.)


 
The Pickup Group Partner: "Yeah, I've got time for a quick run"

Gotham Museum: Each monthly content update is going to be themed around a specific DC comics character. The month of love's featured character is Catwoman. Level 30 players can chase her as she hops between rooftops in a new multiplayer race as she leads you to Gotham Museum's warehouse of artifacts. Once you're there, you can continue her storyline with some quests and instances.
Purrrfect: Things get hairy when ancient Egyptian relics begin transforming security guards and curators into buff lions and tigers (sorry, no bears allowed). Catwoman can't evade the feline metamorphosis either, and players will need to take her down as the last of five bosses, each with plenty of new gear to loot.
Spinecrushers: Also on the way is a new duo instance featuring Bane and his juiced-up posse--props to anybody if they spot Tom Hardy doing a little acting prep-work in this zone.


 

The Lore Hound: "Wonder Woman has a maximum jump distance of..."

Battle the gods: Trouble is afoot on Mount Olympus. The conflict between the heroes and villains of the world has thrown Aphrodite out of sync, and the two sides of love, both caring and selfish, have split her personality. Players will be able to choose which side they want to fight for in the attempt to restore order to the realm of romance.
What's with all the leather?: We don't know what we're going to find out about Selina Kyle (AKA Catwoman), but you can bet there's going to be a lot of info nuggets dropped in this content update about her backstory, characteristics, motivation and all that good stuff.


 
The Ganker: "Kill 'em first, ask questions later"

Open-world battles: More open world zones are being put together for heroes and villains to clash in (hopefully more exciting than the current Ring War event). In an interview with Massively, Chris Cao says that he believes that PvP is one of the driving factors behind DCUO's appeal, so SOE plans to continue to expand PvP content.
A new challenger appears: Alongside her new instances and quests, Catwoman will be added to the roster of available Legends characters to play as. If your opponents have any diamonds, she'll be sure to steal them.
Be a heart-breaker: All those sissy carebears are going to be doing open-world races to collect coins. A real jerk would sit along the race's route and give a soft tap (or stun) to anyone that rushes by, just to screw with their finish time. You bastard.


 



The Skeptic: "I would've liked it more if they'd changed..."

It's the little things: In the same interview, Cao also lists a plethora of upgrades to big and small things on their way, which will hopefully make the player's life easier. Chat is getting a minor upgrade (not the overhaul it needs) for now, with added controls over which channels you join and respond to by default. Animations have been spruced up, and the usual bug fixes and progression tweaks are coming.
More to come: These little fixes are more difficult to nail down ahead of time. We'll be sure to keep you updated as more specifics are announced.


 
Mr. Money Bags: "MORE MONEY MORE MONEY MORE MONEY!"

Auction houses: For everyone looking to make a profit in DC's universe, the auction-house system will help jump start the game's non-existent economy. Selling Valentine's event items, collections, costumes and of course powerful gear should give potential wheelers-and-dealers a good starting point for packing out their virtual wallets. Let the undercutting on Domino Masks begin!


 
How about you? Based on what we're looking forward to most, Lucas is a Pacifist PUG Partner and Josh is a Ganking Casual PUG Partner. What are you?

Sony have released a DC Universe Online trailer to highlight end-game content.

Preventing Mr Freeze from freezing Arkham Asylum? Maybe. Negotiating a toxic maze? Probably not. Facing the pantheon of DC's magical characters? If we're in the mood. Group raids in the Batcave? YES! Where do we sign up?

Click more for the video.





You sign up here by the way.

For more information on DC Universe Online, read our review, join our league, or listen to the latest PC Gamer US podcast where they chat about it in detail.

What's your experience of DC Universe Online? Have you reached the level cap yet? What's Batman really like?

Josh, Logan, Evan, Chris, and Anthony chat about DC Universe: Online, Dead Space 2 and Monday Night Combat. We also hit on some news, surprising announcements and an interview with Monday Night Combat developer, Uber Entertainment.

PC Gamer US Podcast 257 - Squirrelgirl

RSS Feed for all PC Gamer US podcasts

Batman relies on lightning-fast reflexes to dodge a Joker bomb, not a lucky dice roll, and he certainly never auto-attacks Bane. So when I leapt onto the streets of Gotham, clad in the tights and gadget-belt of a newly minted villain named Cat’s Pajamas, to study at the feet of the Clown Prince of Crime, I wanted something other than the stodgy combat of a typical MMO. And DC Universe Online doesn’t disappoint—its fast-paced, kinetic combat and story-driven quests are a breath of fresh air in a genre short on innovation.



DCUO’s combat is an intense, involved experience that plays more like Street Fighter than World of Warcraft, and it makes the whole game feel more alive—especially during boss fights. I bested Mr. Freeze in a round of villain-on-villain violence by dodging a blast from his freeze ray with a last-second evasive roll to the side. The ray struck a cop behind me, encasing him in a block of ice—I picked up the copsicle and hurled him back at Freeze’s face.

Mr. Freeze retaliated by calling in technicians to repair his suit, but I jumped right into the middle of them, tapping right then left mouse buttons to blast waves of energy in a cone around me. I pressed 2 to send them all flying back with my spring-loaded boxing glove (courtesy of the Joker) and followed up with a double left-click and hold to knock the main technician into the air. His feet never touched the ground—I chained together a series of knock-up attacks that rendered him helpless until he was defeated. Knowing that being quick on my feet had made the difference between victory and defeat made it far sweeter.



C-c-c-combo breaker!
As Cat’s Pajamas, I have 15 different attacks in my arsenal, but only six are at the bottom of my screen as simple press-to-use abilities. The rest are attack combos, executed by combining my basic melee and ranged attacks (left and right mouse buttons, respectively) in sequence to interrupt enemy attacks or deal AoE damage and build up power (AKA mana) for special moves. WoW, by contrast, tends to devolve into spamming toolbar abilities until someone dies.

I love that success isn't a matter of calculating efficient spell rotations or equipping powerful gear. It's all about skill—a lesson I learned the hard way when I tried to gank a hero player half my level and got my butt kicked by her perfectly timed blocks and flawless combo attacks.

A few disappointing graphical hiccups, such as textures loading low-res versions before sharpening a few seconds later, and animations sometimes being reduced to flip book-quality at a distance, distract from the action, but the game's visual effects and physics engine work hard to give your attacks real oomph. Fire vortexes tear up and ignite the world around you, and when you punch someone, they awesomely fly back and crash into the stuff behind them. Environmental clutter—desks, lampposts, barrels (pretty much anything that's not part of a building)—can be scattered, smashed, or, even more fun, picked up and thrown at enemies.



Playing with the big boys
Quests flow smoothly and consistently, thanks them all being bundled into compelling story arcs that take you on comic book-length adventures that revolve around a DC character, such as the villain Bane or superheroine Power Girl. These one-hour stories culminate in memorable instanced encounters where you fight alongside or against them, and are easily the highlight of the leveling experience. A stellar cast of voice actors—including Mark Hamill as the Joker and Kevin Conroy as Batman—do a fantastic job of sucking you into the storylines, with few awkward exceptions (Supergirl, I’m looking at you).

The quests themselves aren’t exactly revolutionary—most objectives are the usual kill, use, collect and protect types. However, there are two added mechanics to help keep things fresh: carrying (grabbing a large object and bringing it to a specific location) and transformation (temporarily altering your appearance and powers). One particularly creative quest used these two mechanics to build a timed obstacle course that I had to run through as a toy carrying a power cell, and another built a pretty fun platformer game by transforming me into a non-flying demon that had to hop between floating chunks of land hundreds of feet above ground to collect soul shards. I’m also impressed by the way the quests are written—villains have a real sense that they’re doing evil in missions involving beating up and mutating college students for Lex Luthor or transforming into a demon to slurp up innocent souls like Jell-O shots for Brother Blood, which gives a much-needed distinction from playing as a do-gooder.



Built for speed
Everything in DCUO is streamlined, built to keep you powering ahead and having fun without resistance or downtime. Anyone that hits an enemy gets XP and quest credit for the kill (not just the first person), tapping Ctrl auto-loots everything around you, you automatically receive quests when you enter a new area, and there’s no real death penalty. It’s not a hardcore MMO experience, but it keeps the thrills coming.

I hit the level cap in just 30 hours, which might be discouraging except that, for a just-launched MMO, there's already an absurdly high amount of endgame progression and content available. Specifically, there are six rewarding hard-mode dungeons, two extremely difficult eight-player raids and about 10 hours of diverse, fairly enjoyable repeatable daily content. The daily missions are made up of quests (mostly reworked solo instances), bounties on iconic characters like Bizarro and Flash and rotating "featured maps" in each PvE and PvP mode. I was disappointed that the quests that you’re asked to complete each day don’t automatically rotate, but there’s enough of it that I could delay the feeling of repetition by alternating which ones I played each day.



Most importantly, there're plenty of ways to continue meaningfully advancing your character after the level cap. You can change your weapon type and respec your powers at any time (which drastically changes your playstyle) and even train in multiple weapons, which is made easier by the fact that collecting achievements awards you more points to spend on weapon skills.

Grouping up for big missions consistently offers entertaining challenges set in diverse locations and rewards you with sweet gear themed after iconic DC characters. It's the group dynamics that really steal the show and make you feel heroic, though. Anyone can revive knocked-out players, and every character has two roles that they can swap between—damage-dealing and a utility mode determined by their power set. Nature and Sorcery can heal; Fire and Ice can tank; Gadgets and Mental can control enemies and restore power to the group. It's a great common-sense solution that doesn't punish players' soloing capabilities just because they want to heal their friends.



One of my favorite things about the skill-based combat system is that PvP feels easier to manage, and as a result rarely feels as frustrating or unfair as it can in MMOs where gear is the key to success. The six PvP maps are great, too—they all feature capture-the-flag or control-point gameplay, but each adds at least one unique element, such as the ability to call in NPCs to attack an area, build turrets or close off pathways to change the structure of your base and a slime vat that turns you into a monster with new abilities. Bonus: balance perfectionists can PvP as the iconic DC characters in Legends mode, which removes gear differentiation and power selection as imbalancing variables.

MMO Kryptonite
The character creator is creatively stifling next to the superhero MMO competition, Champions Online and City of Heroes. DCUO offers fewer options at the start, and instead makes you earn the more distinctive costume pieces as you play. I felt thwarted at first, but it’s actually a well thought-out delayed gratification system that gives your character a rewarding sense of progression. Collectors could easily spend months scrounging for the hundreds of iconic and rare costume pieces scattered throughout the game, and explorers will absolutely love Gotham and Metropolis (the two massive cities house all the game’s open-world content), which are full of activity, collectibles and Easter eggs to find.



There's no reward big enough to make up for the game's warped interface, however. Illogically nested menus, a tiny, unresponsive chat interface and lack of tooltips are all symptomatic of an interface designed to be PlayStation 3-friendly. It isn’t enough to throw me into a Hulk-like rage (oops, wrong license) but the extra clicks for simple tasks and borderline broken chat interface are a constant exasperation.

Other than that, DCUO has had one of the smoothest, strongest MMO launches to date, and it’s action-oriented design is a bold step out of WoW’s shadow. From the consistently clever boss fights to the daily activities to the points-of-interest around the world, it makes it look effortless to create interesting activities to amuse players and immerse them in the game's world. Assuming SOE can deliver on its promise to consistently release monthly content updates, DCUO will be a promising leader in an exciting new generation of diverse MMOs.

The latest DC Universe Online patch has arrived aimed at improving the voice chat features of the game. There are also changes to the difficulty of some of the missions, as well as a collection of bug fixes. Sony have been talking about their plans for the next few patches for the game, including their intention to give players the option to turn off the overenthusiastic profanity filter. You'll find the full patch notes below.

Speaking to Eurogamer, community relations manager for Sony Online Entertainment, Tony Jones, revealed their priorities for the next few patches. "Right now, we're working on server stability, things that keep the game running and going fresh. Things like the UI, they're going to be constantly making tweaks to that - the best part of an MMO, it changes constantly and we're very sensitive to the needs of the players."

One of the most unpopular parts of DC Universe Online so far has been the all-seeing profanity filter that has a problematic tendency to sensor swear words that appear inside other words. Jones says "the chat filter is a pet peeve of mine that actually became a very large issue as we got towards launch. Obviously, something of this size, we were at a point where we can work on the chat filter, or we can work on the PS3 freezing - obviously the chat filter's going to wait. There's going to be an option to turn it off and we're working on that."

Thank #^$@ for that. For more on the game check out the official DC Universe Online site, and our first impressions of the game. If you're playing the game, don't forget that or EU DC Universe Online League is still recruiting. Here are the updates made by the latest patch in full.

General

Improved Client performance and stability.
Addressed an issue where other characters may appear to "warp" onscreen.
The time it takes to get to Character Selection on launch has been reduced.

 
Audio

Audio should no longer drop after cutscenes if you have your Music volume set to 0.

 
Chat:

The player’s Voice Chat Channel should now be selected according to the following priority, from highest to lowest:

Alert
Group
Custom
League


 
Player Appearance:

Equipping a new weapon should no longer cause your weapon appearance to disappear.
Swapping weapons with your weapon style locked should no longer cause the weapon appearance to change.

 
Movement

Player character animations should no longer have the chance of getting stuck when weaponizing objects.

 
Missions

Adjusted difficulty of content in the Venom Lab to level 7 to better match the surrounding content.
No Joke quest is now available at level 18 instead of 19.
A Crook’s Best Friend mission is now available at level 18 instead of 19.
Something’s Fishy… quest is now available at level 22 instead of 23.
Road to Hell quest is now available at level 22 instead of 23.
Fateful Omen quest is now available at level 26 instead of 27.
Hardcorps quest is now available at level 26 instead of 27.

 
UI

Pressing the "Accept" button on the Server Selection screen multiple times should no longer result in odd ssues with Character Creation movies and UI.

 

Not even the place where Superman grew up is safe from villainy. Lex Luthor is in town, and he has a brilliant and diabolical plan. He's trapped Doomsday in hi-tech prison, carefully hidden in a place where nobody would ever find him - inside the barn where Superman grew up. Hang on a minute, that's a rubbish plan. Perhaps he figured it'd be the last place Superman would look. He was wrong. The man of steel has recruited you to stop Luthor's scheme as part of one of DC Universe Online's latest alert missions. Read on for details and a video.

Luthor has infected the whole town with a virus that's slowly turning them into Doomsday. Heroes have to deal with this by punching victims of the virus until they're cured. Villains have to deal with this by punching victims because punching is fun. Either way, Doomsday is eventually set loose, and he needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.

Don't forget, the PC Gamer EU guild is recruiting now. All you have to do is be a hero on the Brightest Day server and message Falco Darkwind for an invite. Head over to our forums for more details. For more information on DC Universe Online check out our first impressions and the official DC Universe Online site. Here's the video.